For the first two years of my magic journey, my creative process looked like this: find a trick I liked, learn the mechanics, then figure out something to say while performing it. The words came last. The story — if there was one at all — was an afterthought, a thin layer of verbal paint applied over a mechanical scaffold. The scaffold was the trick. The paint was whatever I could think of.
The results were predictable. My routines worked mechanically. The sleights were clean. The methods were sound. But the performances felt hollow. I would finish a routine at a corporate event in Vienna and see polite nods rather than genuine engagement. People were impressed but not moved. They had witnessed competence but not experienced anything.
I did not understand what was missing until I encountered Cara Hamilton’s approach to building a performance piece, and it reframed my entire creative process.
The Moon, Not the Rocket
Hamilton describes a process that begins not with the trick, but with the destination. The metaphor I use to remember it: start with the moon, not the rocket. What is the experience you want the audience to have? What should they feel when the performance is over? What emotional destination are you aiming for?
This sounds obvious. It is not. Most performers — certainly myself included, for longer than I care to admit — start with the rocket. They start with the method, the sleight, the clever mechanism. They build the vehicle first and only then wonder where it might take them. Hamilton’s process inverts this completely. The destination defines everything that follows.
When I first tried this approach, I sat in a hotel room in Graz with a blank notebook and wrote a single sentence: “I want the audience to feel the uncanniness of a genuine coincidence.” Not a trick description. Not a method. A feeling. An emotional target. That sentence became the seed for a routine I still perform in keynotes, one where two strangers in the audience discover an impossible connection between choices they made independently. The feeling came first. The method came second. And because the feeling was the foundation, every choice I made afterward — the words, the props, the pacing, the music — served that feeling rather than competing with it.
Step One: The Emotional Destination
The first step is defining what the performance should make the audience feel. Not “what the trick looks like” but “what the audience experiences internally.” This distinction matters enormously.
A card changing from one value to another is a visual event. An audience member discovering that a free choice they made somehow predicted an outcome that was sealed in an envelope before the show began is an emotional event. The mechanics might be similar. The experience is worlds apart.
I started applying this by writing feeling words at the top of every new routine I developed. “Wonder.” “Unease.” “Joy.” “Suspicion that reality is not quite solid.” These are not trick descriptions. They are emotional coordinates. And like coordinates, they give you a direction to travel even when you are not sure of the route.
The hardest part of this step is honesty. It is tempting to write “astonishment” for every routine, because astonishment feels like the gold standard of magic. But not every piece needs to astonish. Some pieces need to charm. Some need to unsettle. Some need to create warmth. Being honest about the emotional destination means being honest about what a particular effect can actually deliver, and what you as a performer are capable of conveying.
Step Two: The Story That Carries The Feeling
Once you know the destination, you need a vehicle. That vehicle is a story — not necessarily a plot-heavy narrative with characters and conflict, but a narrative thread that gives the audience a reason to care about what they are watching.
This is where I had to unlearn something. I used to think “story” meant “patter” — a tale I would tell while doing the trick. Something to fill the silence between sleights. Hamilton’s perspective is different. The story is not something layered on top of the trick. The story is the reason the trick exists. The story is why this impossible thing is happening, why it matters, and why the audience should invest their attention in it.
For the coincidence routine I mentioned, the story is simple: I talk about the strange moments in life when unrelated events align in ways that feel designed. I share a real experience from my consulting work — two clients on the same day, in different cities, independently presenting the same obscure framework in their strategy decks. No supernatural claim. Just the honest observation that coincidence feels like something more, even when we know it is not. That observation becomes the frame through which the audience watches two volunteers make independent choices that converge impossibly.
The story does not explain the trick. The story creates the emotional context that makes the trick meaningful. Without it, the convergence is a puzzle. With it, the convergence is an experience.
Step Three: The Five-Pointed Star
Hamilton uses a framework she calls the Five-Pointed Star — five elements that support the story: setting, sound, light, props, and the narrative itself. Each point of the star either reinforces the story or contradicts it. There is no neutral ground.
This was a revelation for me. I had been treating these elements as independent variables. Music was something I added because it sounded nice. Props were whatever the trick required. The table was whatever the venue provided. I never asked whether all of these elements were telling the same story.
When I started evaluating routines through the Five-Pointed Star, I found contradictions everywhere. A routine meant to feel intimate and personal was being performed with mass-produced props that looked like they came from a catalog. A routine meant to feel mysterious was being performed under bright fluorescent lighting that made the whole thing feel like a product demonstration. A routine meant to evoke wonder was accompanied by upbeat pop music that undercut the quiet astonishment I was trying to create.
The fix was not complicated. It was just a matter of asking, for each element: does this support the story, or does it contradict it? A prop wrapped in silk rather than sitting in a printed box with a barcode. A request for the house lights to dim slightly during a particular piece. A shift from energetic music to something more textured and atmospheric. Small changes, each one aligning another point of the star with the emotional destination.
The cumulative effect of alignment is remarkable. When setting, sound, light, props, and narrative all point in the same direction, the audience does not notice any single element. They simply feel that the experience is coherent, immersive, and real. When even one element contradicts the others, the audience notices the contradiction without being able to name it. Something feels off. The experience has a crack in it.
Step Four: The “So What” Edit
The final step is ruthless editing. Hamilton calls it the “So What” rule: if any detail in the routine would provoke a “so what” from the audience, remove it. Everything must have a job. You must be able to explain what that job is.
I applied this rule to my entire working repertoire over the course of a long weekend in a hotel room in Linz. I went through every routine, every line, every prop, and asked: what is this doing here? Does the audience care? Does this serve the emotional destination or does it just serve my ego?
The cuts were painful. I removed entire phases from routines that I was proud of technically but that did not serve the audience’s experience. I eliminated jokes that got laughs but disrupted the emotional tone of the piece they lived inside. I cut a prop reveal that I loved performing because it was technically demanding — but the audience had no way to appreciate the difficulty, so all they saw was a pause that broke the narrative momentum.
After the edit, my routines were shorter. They were also better. The ratio of meaningful moments to filler had shifted dramatically. Instead of forty minutes of material where twenty minutes were doing real work, I had thirty minutes where almost every moment earned its place.
The Process In Practice
I have used this four-step process for every new piece I have developed since discovering it. Emotional destination first. Story second. Five-Pointed Star alignment third. “So What” edit fourth.
The process is not fast. Building a routine this way takes longer than the old method of learn-the-trick-and-bolt-on-words. But the results are incomparably better. Routines built this way feel intentional. They feel like they were designed rather than assembled. Audiences respond to that design even if they cannot articulate why.
The most surprising benefit has been consistency. Routines built around a feeling and a story are easier to perform consistently because the emotional destination acts as a compass. If I lose my place in the script, I still know where I am going. If a volunteer says something unexpected, I can improvise my way back to the story because I know what the story is trying to accomplish. The destination does not change just because the route shifts.
Starting With The Destination Changes Everything
The old way — trick first, words second, feeling optional — produced performances that were technically functional but emotionally empty. The new way — feeling first, story second, every element aligned to serve both — produces performances that audiences remember.
I still love the mechanics. I still spend hours in hotel rooms working on technique, on consistency, on the invisible architecture that makes impossible things look effortless. But that work now serves something. The mechanics are the engine. The story is the journey. And the emotional destination is the moon.
Start with the moon.